The impact of website/app performance on the bottom line of an Internet firm is an undisputed fact (refer to our earlier blog for further discussion on the subject). Over the years, the industry has come to terms with no longer considering performance as an afterthought and making it a top…

In the digital world, performance, availability, and reliability are key pillars of business that can impact revenue, reputation, and operational excellence. We often write about the impact that third-party services have on performance on our blog, but sometimes that impact is felt in our personal lives as well. Every year, we…

One of the most challenging aspects of optimizing web page performance while using a CDN is the handling of the base page delivery (also referred as HTML, Homepage, Landing Page). Part of the what makes this so difficult is the perceived “non-cacheability” of dynamic base pages. Historically, the base-pages were…

Toys R Us is no Black Friday rookie; the major retailer and their current hosting and CDN providers have completed 11 holiday seasons now. Between following some best practices, using static HTML strategically, and running on a high-capacity stack, they’ve pretty much got the online holiday process down. This year,…

The holiday season is upon us and with it comes the most crucial quarter for all businesses. This month brings with it an increase in shoppers scouting for the best deals online; these consumers are ready to spend big during the holidays. Retailers prepare themselves weeks and months in advance…

Black Friday is one of the toughest days of the year for ecommerce companies. A retailer’s brand reputation, customer loyalty, and revenue are all at stake on this single day. Some of the more seasoned online stores start their Black Friday preparation many months ahead of time to ensure the best…

E.H. Simpson first described this phenomenon in 1951. The name Simpson’s paradox was introduced by Colin R. Blyth in 1972.[1] Blyth mentioned that: G. W. Haggstrom pointed out that Simpson’s paradox is the simplest form of the false correlation paradox in which the domain of x is divided into short…

Understanding the user experience is important for anybody with an online presence. Many analytics solutions are available to help organizations understand what page yields greater user engagement, what paths a user takes through a site, which pieces of content are most popular and how fast pages load. Real user monitoring…

In Part I, we provided an overview of the metrics arms race and had walked through the use of sampling in this regard. We had also discussed the importance of baking in recency of data during sampling and some of the pitfalls of sampling such as the sampling error. Recall…

In a recent report from MarketsAndMarkets, it was forecasted that IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) market shall grow from $2.17B by 2015 to $9.79B by 2020, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 35.2% from 2015 to 2020. This coupled with decreasing cost of HDDs on a per GB basis…